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"Why do many Muslim-majority societies exhibit dictatorship and violence? It is not due to Islam nor aspects of Muslim culture. Rather, this book argues the institutional legacy of the Muslim conquests and variation in nontax government revenues (rents) explain patterns of dictatorship and violence in many Muslim societies today"--

"Attracting financial capital is essential for economic growth in developing countries, but can often tragically foster nondemocratic politics. Consider, for example, the impact of foreign aid. Since 2008 Ethiopia has been one of the largest recipients of U.S. aid in Africa, averaging around $80 million per year. While intended to foster economic development, increasingly practitioners are growing wary of the aid's political ramifications. Before the Ethiopian national election in 2010, foreign donors were charged with "subsidizing a regime that is rapidly becoming one of the most repressive and dictatorial on the continent." Western aid officials "seem reluctant to admit that there are two Prime Minister Meles Zenawis. One is a clubbable, charming African who gives moving speeches at Davos and other elite forums about fighting poverty and terrorism. The other is a dictator whose totalitarianism dates backs to Cold War days."

AbstractBy raising household income, remittances lower the marginal utility of targeted electoral transfers, thus weakening the efficacy of vote buying. Yet, remittances make individuals wealthier and believe the national economy is performing well, which is positively attributed to the incumbent. Building on these insights, I show that the confluence of these divergent channels generate a surprising result that at increasingly higher levels of dissatisfaction with the incumbent, a remittance recipient is more likely to vote for the incumbent than a non‐remittance recipient. These predictions and their underlying mechanisms are substantiated across 18 Latin American countries.

Given their political incentives, governments in more autocratic polities can strategically channel unearned government and household income in the form of foreign aid and remittances to finance patronage, which extends their tenure in political office. I substantiate this claim with duration models of government turnover for a sample of 97 countries between 1975 and 2004. Unearned foreign income received in more autocratic countries reduces the likelihood of government turnover, regime collapse, and outbreaks of major political discontent. To allay potential concerns with endogeneity, I harness a natural experiment of oil price–driven aid and remittance flows to poor, non–oil producing Muslim autocracies. The instrumental variables results confirm the baseline finding that authoritarian governments can harness unearned foreign income to prolong their rule. Finally, I provide evidence of the underlying causal mechanisms that governments in autocracies use aid and remittances inflows to reduce their expenditures on welfare goods to fund patronage.